jb17

How do you find the optimal split?

I think your main point is wrong. It might be that some of the technological advancements are still (73 years after it was written) unrealistic, but they are not what makes the world 'bad': They are just tools to bring the ideas about caste and class to their extremes, and make them clearer that way.

I would agree though that not all aspects of the 'dystopian world' are bad, and it's very interesting to read his utopian book Island, that definitely embraces drug and hedonism, but in a different way.

I don't think I ever encountered that argument, and when I see people arguing against it, it always seems to be a straw man.

The argument I've encountered goes more like this: Because there has been historical oppression, we can't easily distinguish the influence of that from biology and should remove the oppression before we come up with biological theories that justify the oppression. That seems reasonable to me.

I don't think anyone is denying physical differences between people with XX and XY chromosomes. I also think it's common knowledge by now that sex influences the development of diseases (which is what the paper is about).

What the debate is usually about is inequalities in social power relations and whether these can be attributed to what you call 'social conditioning' or biology. This paper doesn't contribute anything to that question.

You seem to suggest that people are completely determined by their biological setup, and that there are no influences from society. I don't think that's right.

Hades is not hell, and actually not such a bad place. It's where all people go when they die, and only a small part is for torturing bad people.